It is certainly interesting what you an stumble upon, four hours into a Facebook binge. The Facebook abyss was unfortunately my bleak reality as I tried to recover from sickness about twenty four hours after David Bowies death. Amongst all the tribute posts devoted to him there was a link to a news story about Bowie being involved in the world of “Baby Groupies” (Mattix). Baby Groupies is the term that refers to the gaggle of pre- teen to teenage girls that notoriously ran with the rockstars of the 70’s and often formed sexual relationships with them (Mattix).  What I want to examine in this blog post is the tendency for celebrity life narratives to skip over deviant parts of their respective lives, while life narratives written about “everyday people” such as Missing Sarah- A Memoir of Loss does not. In fact, the book Missing Sarah is devoted to “sex workers everywhere” which in a way highlights aspects of her life that the general public view as deviant (De Vries, preface). Even though the book itself does not shed Sarah in a negative light it certainly does not omit entirely that part of her life, as celebrity memoirs tend to do.

Lori Mattix interviewed Micheal Kaplan were she recounts an interaction with bowie in which she “was not even 15 and and he wanted to take me to his hotel room” (Mattix). Michael later goes on to claim that she lost her virginity that night in a threesome with David Bowie (Mattix). Michael continues to describe another relationship that she had with another rock star, Jimmy Page. Pages and Kaplans relationship was rather well documented. Many pictures of the two are featured in the interview. The relationships these men had with these groupies could very well be classified as rape, considering the girls in some situations were not at the age of consent. Neither Bowies or Pages obituary featured anything remotely to do with their deviant behaviour, in fact they almost entirely skipped over any part of their lives that were heavily involved with drugs or partying instead choosing to focus on their artistic accomplishments. Pages biography mentions his hard parting life style only when talking about a death of a fellow band mate at Pages house due to over drinking (Serpick).

For two “rock stars” who were notorious for their heavy partying life style there is almost no mention of it in their respective life narratives. Why is it that celebrities are afforded the luxury of their mistakes being omitted from their story, while normal people are not. Perhaps this can be attributed to a social phenomena I recently studied in a sociology class of mine, where dominant class, in this case would be the celebrities, are afforded social acceptance and a pass on things they do wrong while lower classes do not for the same offence (Ritzer &Neal, 245-246). The general public tend to idolize celebrities as gods  and don’t believe that they can do any wrong. Society omits parts of their lives that they don’t want to see and as a result the content disparity between celebrity life narratives and the general public’s is vast. Every person through their life time is bound to make mistakes but refusing to touch on them when remembering them only perpetuates the idea further that celebrities are not humans and should be treated better than the rest of the population. I have yet to hear any outrage over Bowies or  pages behaviour, and before you dismiss it by saying “it was the 70s”, think about if you knew a man who was Jimmy Pages age dating a fifteen year old girl. Celebrities should be judged just the same as the rest of us.

Citations:

Sweeting, Adam. “David Bowie Obituary.” The Guardian. 11 Jan. 2016. Web. 29 Feb. 2016.

Mattix, Lori. “I Lost My Virginity to David Bowie.” Thrillist. 27 Oct. 2015. Web. 29 Feb. 2016.

Serpick, Evan. “Jimmy Page Biography.” Rolling Stone. n.d. Web. 29 Feb. 2016.

Ritzer, George & Neal Guppy. Introduction to Sociology: Canadian Version. Canada: SAGE Publications 2014.

De Vries, Maggie. Missing Sarah: A memoir of Loss. Toronto: Penguin 2008. Print.

Today I had the pleasure of seeing the presentations of projects completed by  groups in my english class. The projects presented today focused on presenting archival information in a way that can help further research and understanding of the personal documents of prominent people within British Columbia. I, however, saw potential for a couple of the formats used by the groups to showcase their work to be effective in presenting other information. One project in particular that I thought did a great job of presenting the information they had, and thus got me to think that this format could also be used to display other information, was a groups project that did a “Info Graph”.  The way they presented the information was clear and appealing to eye and provided easily understood chunks of information that (literally) mapped out the thinking process for the reader. The group was composed of Anna, Emily, Emma, and Mishal and they provided information on the racism against Chinese citizens in Canada.

During their presentation, I could not help but think of an article we had to read earlier in the class by Jiwani & Young called “ Missing and Murdered Women: Reproducing Marginality in News Discourse.” The paper focused on the missing and murdered women on the downtown East Side of Vancouver.  The paper  mainly focused on the media representation of the women and how the discourse surrounding the news story tended to paint the woman as the problem and continually marginalized them (Jiwani and Young, pg 895).  Throughout the entire article they continued to point out various news stories and different accounts in which the woman who got attacked were poorly represented. I believe that this article would benefit from organizing the information into a info graph in order to give a time line to the readers for better understanding. Obviously, an article form is better for scholarly readers, however, in order to get awareness out to non scholarly audiences, it might be beneficial to breakdown the information and present it in a way that the reader can clearly see the tactics used by the media. One way the media tried to dehumanize the victims were by grouping them as “aboriginal” and “sex workers” (Jiwani and Young, pg 895).  It is important to not let that veiled discrimination slide, the more people that are looking for the ways in which the news skews its stories, the better.

The analysis done in the research paper could bring awareness to a larger audience and help to change the conversation surrounding woman’s portrayal in the media, particularly surrounding aboriginal woman . The potential for the amount of people that could have access to that information and actually become aware of this issue if an info graph was given to an audience, for example, like high school students, is amazing. It would be so useful to have a time line of the attacks juxtaposed with the news coverage of that attack. I think that information would provide a harrowing portrayal of the medias short fallings in covering these cases and allow people to realize the stigmas they might hold themselves.

Citation:

Jiwani, Yasmin and Young, Mary Lynn. “Missing and Murdered Women: Reproducing Marginality in News Discourse.” Canadian Journal of Communication 31.4 (2006): 895-917. Web. 3. Feb. 2016